It has been said for quite a while now that the rise of online media, specifically blogs and social media, threatens to condemn traditional print media to increasing irrelevance and eventual extinction. It’s staggeringly evident from all recent statistics that the reading time, in terms of man-hours and woman-hours, spent on social media is rapidly rising whereas that spent on traditional print media is on the wane. Within the last decade, more than a billion people have joined Facebook, and this is just one of the social media sites on the internet. Within the same period, the number of print copies sold by newspapers has steadily fallen. Some iconic print publications, such as Britannica encyclopedia, have closed shop within this period, and this is attributable to the slump in sales.

When I was a child, maybe five or six, some phrases plunged me into utter perplexity whenever I heard them. For instance, adults used the expression, 'okuteera amabare', which directly translates to 'the knocking of stones' to describe the making of music. When their discourse turned to the war that was then raging in the country, they said Museveni was 'fighting for the drum' (narwaanira engoma). I remember thinking deeply about the stones in the compound and the pebbles at the well side, wondering how the mere act of knocking them together could result in the beautiful music I often heard blaring out of the radio. I remember wondering whether a drum – it was a familiar object, for I was a regular at the village church – could be so important that, for its sake, Museveni engaged in a fight that entailed the ominous throbs of gunfire that sporadically reached our village. But the adults threw these phrases about in a matter-of-fact fashion, as though it was the most natural thing in the world that knocking stones together could result in music, or that dispute over a drum could translate into a fierce exchange of gunfire. I became absolutely baffled. And because my father was rather severe, and signs of slow wits could fetch a spank, I didn't voice my questions. I kept curiously glancing at stones and drums, and figuring that there must be something about life that was beyond the reach of my little head.

To the proposition that beneath the vulgarity of Nyanzi's posts there is profound sense and poetry, this is what George Orwell (1903 - 1950) had to say: "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things such as that; no ordinary man can be such a fool."